Node.js Forked By Top Contributors 254
New submitter jonhorvath writes: Several of the top contributors to Node.js, a popular open source run-time environment, have decided to fork the project, creating io.js as an alternative. The developers were unhappy with how cloud computing company Joyent was directing work on Node.js. Mikeal Rogers said, "We don't want to have just one person who's appointed by a company making decisions. We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus." Here's the new repository, and a README file to go with it. A developer at Uber tweeted that they've already migrated to io.js on their production systems. It'll be interesting to see how many other sites follow.
main site (Score:5, Informative)
I believe this is one part of the "Node Forward" [nodeforward.org] project.
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Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, after reading that blog post, I suddenly understand exactly why they're forking themselves away from Joyent. And to be honest, I'm now expecting that Io.js will become dominant over Node.js in time, which is the opposite of what I thought yesterday.
Apparently Joyent doesn't want to focus on the product. 99% of people who depend on Node.js don't give a flying fart about what pronouns are used in COMMENTS in the library.
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Apparently Ben Noordhuis does.
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Wait, WTF?
From your first link:
That's some rather petty bullshit, truth be told - by all parties involved, including the author of that blog entry. Now if they were fighting over something, you know, *technical*, I'd be more s
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It's important. If you don't think it is, try looking for any gendered pronoun in (say) the Eclipe Documentation [eclipse.org] (Think IBM) or in the Java Tutorial [oracle.com] (think Oracle).
And no, I haven't looked at it in depth, but I trust both IBM and Oracle to use gender neutral pronouns (except for the rare cases when they want to specify the gender of a person, as in "Alice" or "Bob"). What is good
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he would not have been fired for using the gendered pronoun, but for refusing to accept it being changed.
That's not a firing offense in any sane programming shop.
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Informative)
1. A pull request containing only two very minor changes to comments in the source code was made.
2. Mr. Noordhuis rejected the pull request with a terse "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
3. A flamewar erupts about the appropriateness and neccessity of the singular "they". Mr. Noordhuis is not participating in the flamewar.
4. The pull request is forced through while the flamewar rages on.
5. Mr. Noordhuis reverts the forced landing on the grounds that it violated project policy. The revert immediately begins to accumulate a fair number of hostile comments.
6. The flamewar intensifies. Allegations are made about Mr. Noordhuis's character.
7. A joyent employee, acting in an official role and using Joyent's official blog, decided to write and publish a text about how Mr. Noordhuis is sexist and would've gotten fired from Joyent on the spot, indirectly calling Mr. Noordhuis an asshole in the process. Joyent, by not taking the text down, implicitly endorses it.
8. Mr. Noordhuis posts into the discussion to point out that the rejection/revert had been made on purely procedural grounds. He simultaneously announces that he will leave the project, which I can fully understand.
After that the flame war goes on. Some people actually point out that Joyent's behavior is highly unprofessional, which the Joyent employee disregards because "'Fired' isn't a gendered word that has larger social ramifications that careless use of pronouns does." So yes; according to Joyent, publicly calling someone so sexist that they would've been fired on the spot is less bad than using "he" in a gender-neutral role. (Bonus points for one woman in the discussion calling the whole thing a "witch burning". For the record, she was also the one person to offer a solution instead of flaming about pronouns.)
If IBM and Oracle worked remotely like that they'd be up to their ears in wrongful termination suits. And libel suits. And, depending on whether insults are an actionable offense in the relevant jurisdiction, suits about that too.
The sad thing is that early on someone offered a perfectly reasonable way of resolving the situation: Mandating the singular "they" in the project's coding guidelines and then floating changes to existing code until they can be mixed in with other refactoring commits. Of course it was completely ignored.
(For the record, I am a proponent of singular-they and I still think that the term "social justice warriors" with all its negative connotations entirely applies here. Many of the people involved completely went off the rails as soon as the pull request was rejected and immediately assumed Mr. Noordhuis to be a moustache-twirling antifeminist villain.)
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Thanks for clearing up what the real controversy was.
I have no idea where I stand on the issue. He's right, it IS trivial. But who cares? He probably should have just shrugged it off. But on the other hand, I'd say, if someone wanted to change the documentation wording, fine... but let it go in along with some other substantial re-write. And I think that was the guys point... we're not going to do a commit just for the sake of politics. What the people who wanted this done should have done was sat down, re-
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Not being a Node.js developer/user, I am not aware of the organizational politics surrounding this pronoun gender issue. But a quick scan of coments and related threads leads me to believe that this issue is the symptom of some underlying politics at Joyent. The documentation and development direction conroversies are hiding the fact that management has lost control of the culture of the company. And now a few factions are engaged in an office war and higher-ups are powerless to deal with it.
I don't know w
Stupid and hypocritical (Score:2)
Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Technical decisions have practically dick to do with empathy. Every single time I have tried to add features to a product or system for "social" value I've been slapped the hell down. Technical decisions are base
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you are proud to do buisness with them why? Because their logic is that if you use any gender specific pronouns you are, by default, misogynistic?
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I thought their logic was that using the male pronoun for persons of unknown gender or in contexts where gender ought to be irrelevant is both unnecessary and sexist - even if it used to be standard usage. How hard is it to use they/their instead of he/his? I manage it easily enough.
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Your philosophy is to waste time, effort and resources for an army of experts and spit on their work, so that in the extremely unlikely case someone who is bothered by gendered pronouns happens to read the obscure comment at obscure comment of an obscure part of some code?
By the way, show your face, don't post as AC.
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He's referring to me, I think. And I agree - I'll post any way I please.
Keep something in mind - this pull request was submitted by THE FORMER MAINTAINER.
And any time someone uses "SJW" as an insult, I know I'm dealing with someone who doesn't deserve my respect - and that's why I made the "congratulations" comment.
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People like you can't tell a noisy obnoxious scammer apart from a person who actually contributes to the good of humanity, and your respect is more often than not woefully misplaced.
As result, nobody of any actual significance cares about your respect - only your companions from your echo chamber, blinded to any real world issues, do.
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That is not what they stated. In addition using they/their in a singular fashion is considered to be improper use by many in grammar.
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I've heard the same said about passive voice, and starting a novel by describing the weather. I'm not in the habit of following rules off cliffs. Until the prescriptivists who insist that singular they/their as a gender-neutral pronoun come up with a better alternative, they're welcome to kiss my fat New Yorker ass.
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Actually that is not what it said at all. They said that :
it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered.
So it was not that they had a masculine pronoun, but that the developer did not believe in gender neutral. It could have been feminine or masculine, the company did not care, in fact they specifically state that it was not the issue..
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I don't think your statement of
is an accurate interpretation. Mine may not be either,
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That's not what the post said. It said that if you insist on using masculine pronouns to the point of rejecting pull requests which contain non-masculine pronouns, you are not being a very nice person.
The entire intent of the pull request was to change a pronoun and there was nothing else of value in it. He didn't reject a legitimate pull request that had non-masculine pronouns - he rejected two pull requests that did nothing but change a single pronoun each.
You can see them here:
https://github.com/alex/libuv/... [github.com]
https://github.com/alex/libuv/... [github.com]
I typically also write using non-gendered pronouns just because I like the style better. But you can bet your ass that I'm not going to accept a modification to
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Changing a pronoun is not worth of developer resources. I would have reversed it too -- we don't need everyone's principled opinions infiltrating the codebase and starting problems between people's values and beliefs.
The thing is, the change was done by some third party. Rejecting it and justifying actually took *more* work than just accepting it. The change was just inside comments. Now if the change was to function names or something, that would be different.
If I were faced with a commit that just changed he to they or he to she or she to he or they to he, I'd probably accept it because I don't care what a comment says. The exception would be if it became apparent that two committers cared in different ways about
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Changing a pronoun is not worth of developer resources. I would have reversed it too -- we don't need everyone's principled opinions infiltrating the codebase and starting problems between people's values and beliefs.
The thing is, the change was done by some third party. Rejecting it and justifying actually took *more* work than just accepting it.
THIS time. When the next 1,273 "single word in a comment" submissions come in to be reviewed, is the total time spent on them still 0? He is "not interested in trivial changes like that." Accepting one invites more.
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What gets me is all this fuss over words in the damn *comments*. Who gives a crap either way.
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As noted elsewhere: This was a pull that added nothing to the code except for changing comments. Ben Noordhuis initially and rightly rejected this change as it added nothing of value. Isaac Schlueter then did an override and made the commit. This sent out two very strong messages that should give project contributors pause and was likely the reason for Noordhuis' attempt to revert the commit: (1) The project leads put high value in making political statements over only allowing quality commits on every
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That's why I delete them (Score:2)
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Even typo changes need justification because, as you remarked, "These 'trivial' changes often cause merge conflicts with other trees."
As for this kind of change...if its a real issue, then there needs to be a policy, e.g., "always avoid the singular they". (Personally I often use it, if I remember to. But it sure isn't what I was taught in school. Still, I find it much better than "s/he", though in some contexts I'll use "s/he/it".)
Linux = Lusers (Score:2)
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whoa ho ho there. This whole thing is about some language nuance. If you're going to try and use a broad brush, you'd best use it consistently.
Because MLK and Rosa Parks were typically refereed to as "civil rights activists", and the term "social justice warrior" (I had to google that by the way) only gained traction THIS year. [google.com]
If we're going to get in a huff over language, I believe that civil rights and social justice, while having a large overlap, aren't quite the same thing. Social justice is farther-rea
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Interesting)
[...] to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent tolerates.
This is about replacing "he" with "they" somewhere. Noordhuis' single response in the comments section to this change was "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.", and a flamewar that is as stupid as it is predictable ensues. Joyent then jumps to the conclusion not just that rejecting a trivial change like this constitutes an insistence on principle that pronouns should be gendered, but that such insistence springs from the notion that masculinity is inextricably linked to software. And this is a sacking offense? MikeRT called it right when he used the term "SJW tools". To me, this would at most be cause to remind the employee of whatever Diversity policies the company has in place.
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Insightful)
They lost me when they said had he been a Joyent employee it would have been a firing offense. I say: give it up, She's dead Jim and you killed it by politicizing a commit. Fork it and forget it. goodbye.
FAIL! (Score:2)
If one is going to properly sanitize a statement, "you" can't be used. As a reader, *I* didn't kill shit, and it is antagonistic to suggest I did. Offensive even! See the stigma regarding "you people" or "those people".
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Noordhuis had not one but TWO responses: (1) as you said he dismissed it as trivial, (2) when someone else nevertheless accepted the change he tried to undo it and chided them publically for bypassing both him and (???forgot alias).
Noordhuis chided someone publically, he got chided back publically, seems about fair.
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And he has a sexist past. Look how he responded at the bottom of this post [google.com] (If you think it's funny, you're a misogynistic porcine woman hater, etc). More importantly, note that his avoidance of technical subjects began early. He's management material, right there.
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...or you could of course just be complete idiots.
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're blinded by your strong support of activism. The issue is the way that Joyent threw the guy under the bus. They said, in essence, "We would fire this guy if we could, but he's totally not an employee. We hate him as much as you do, so don't hate on us!" And they said it in a very public way. That's alienation. Oh, they forked it? Big surprise.
If you actually looked at the merge request he rejected it for being a worthless change. He didn't invest any value in a change that had no functional improvements and didn't even make the documentation any clearer. It was just churn. He didn't reject it on the grounds that pronouns should be masculine.
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Informative)
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The change is so trivial that I was sure there is more to the story. And there you have it:
"accumulate small doc changes until they had enough to prevent git-blame from becoming too convoluted"
So the change was not totally rejected but only postponed until there was enough small changes to roll into one bigger update? And Joylent was ready to break guidelines just to unnecessarily underline their political correctness?
Does not sound very professional. I think the decision to fork was the correct one.
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh nonsense.
Back here in the real world, this is how this sounds:
"Ben decided that someone was making changes to the codebase that had no technical purpose, which served solely to push someone's weird social agenda and desperation to modify the language to suit them, as well as to refer to anything which went otherwise as sexist. Since this is pointless, and since Ben has been in communities where this created unnecessary shitstorms, Ben rejected the PR in the hope of preventing a bunch of drama-driven developers from wasting a year complaining about unimportant things. When Isaac decided to merge the PR, Ben felt slighted: he had been given the authority to make these decisions, and Isaac decided to make a social point that Ben would get trampled no matter what."
That's all fine and good. One developer is being a neckbeard about not wanting to hear a cry of oppression in something that has nothing to do with social justice. The other developer is being a neckbeard about being all inclusive no matter the tone.
Then you get to the point that adults are angry about.
That says "we value Ben so little that our disagreement over the nature of an unimportant, purely social justice related, non-technical PR would have caused us to fire him on the spot, instead of to have a discussion."
That's *ridiculous*. Employers have an obligation to their employees to create safety and stability. There is no legitimate cause on God's green earth for that to be a fireable offense. Joyent's management are PR-oriented children, and that you're standing up for them is an embarrassment to the 'movement' you're trying to rationalize.
I am a gay and trans ally.
But nobody should get anything sterner over something like that than a stern talking to. That's *obscene*.
Felt similar about the "firing" bit as extreme (Score:2)
I especially liked the link to "empathy is a core engineering value" though: http://www.listbox.com/member/... [listbox.com]
Linked from: https://www.joyent.com/blog/th... [joyent.com]
And if so, should not empathy extend throughout all levels of a learning organization, including between managers and subordinates? Everyone is learning stuff all the time, including about cultural changes. Firing someone rather than trying to understand the situation and the individual's motives more first and whether change is needed or possible does n
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Such minimal corrections are a clutter that makes actual, important changes get lost in the noise. It's not that the change was wrong. It was that the usefulness of the change didn't justify creating the clutter it added on maintenance level.
Also:
* 1. Read errors are reported only if nsent==0, otherwise we return nsent.
* The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop
* him from sending it twice.
Is this comment sexist?
Is this something worthy of firing a talented
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I'd say there is logic in not bothering to make the change, it takes effort and brings no value. My experience has been that gendered pronouns are often used in documentation, though usually they use a mix of the two genders.
That said there isn't logic in attempting to revert the commit when another committer merged it (unless the rule was that documentation would use a gendered pronoun). Though I also don't think the tone and content of Joyents post is appropriate either.
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:4, Interesting)
If I ever worked in a place that had so much drama over pronouns, I would be looking for another job. That's a hostile work environment.
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Thats exactly it. Drama is hostile, doesnt matter over what exactly. SJW or something else.
I choose to work somewhere to build a particular product, idea or service - thats what im there for, if it comes with a truckload of drama and emotion i will simply go elsewhere. Which is what the devs here did.
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Hey guess what, names for things are kind of important. You know what I don't want to install on my grandmother's computer? A program called "Gigolo" - I don't care how good it may or may not be at managing network connections.
The army of people who seem to think they're so logical and above emotions ironically are always the most upset when people want to change stuff which they think "doesn't matter".
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i see your point and what you could do is this: kindly ask the developer(s) for a name change. if they are ok, then you can install it, if not, then simply you install some other thing. easy? what's the point in assembling a mob to force the developer? how dare you? so, you may be picky about names, but someone cannot name HIS OWN CREATION as he pleases because you grandma could be offended if she knew? get off my lawn. there is a name for this: "gutmensch". your point turns to bullshit IF you're not capabl
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Hey guess what, names for things are kind of important. You know what I don't want to install on my grandmother's computer? A program called "Gigolo" - I don't care how good it may or may not be at managing network connections.
So given that the topic is gender-neutral pronouns, you'd be okay with "prostitute" or "sex worker" I take it? As long as it's not "gigolo" or "whore", etc.
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I wouldn't want to work for a company that would try to fire someone for rejecting a patch of the comment text. How absurd and spiteful.
Not to mention a patch which changes a valid sentence to a broken one, my English teacher would mark down this sentence:
The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.
Them? Them who? Oh, the user. If you can't use a singular (he/she/it) then you must rewrite the whole sentence to be "Users needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.
I'd also try to revert that patch simply for being broken English. And if that's a firing offense, well I'd be happy to not work there anymore. Best of luck to io.js.
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Or just "..., to avoid sending it twice". Still, I wouldn't consider this a priority for devs' time.
Storm in a pisspot.
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Your english teacher is an idiot, but that's hardly unusual.
Sure some prescriptivists want to ignore that singular they has been in continuous use in english since the 14th century, but being an idiot is hardly uncommon.
Still patching a comment solely to change his/their is stupid - there isn't a single person who is confused by the original language and hence no reason to change it. There are good reason's not to change it though - it could cause conflicts in merges if someone else happens to have been wor
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Again, here is someone who didn't look at the request and doesn't understand why it was rejected. Just lap up that SJW narrative and don't think about it. You get an A+ in modern activism.
What happened here is a request was deferred for valid technical reasons and then removed because of intra-project politics. Those same politics led to the forking.
Re:Joyent unfit to lead them? (Score:5, Informative)
In the English language, words like "he" and "him" are used in the contexts when the sex is masculine, neutral, or unknown. Words like "she" and "her" are only used when the sex is both known and known to be feminine. Let me repeat and bold this: "he" and "him" are the gender-neutral terms. The documentation was already gender-neutral. What is perverse is saying that somebody should be fired because you don't know second-grade English, as Bryan Cantrill did.
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I am not a linguist, but I think you are confusing articles with pronouns. The former is not as powerful in communicating social norms as the latter. More to the point, descriptors for people are more powerful than descriptors for non-person objects. To suggest that language is just arbitrary (in idiosyncratic, not post-structuralist terms [1]), and not without ideological power is naive.
No anglo-centricity about it. Sounds like someone made a fuss about a simple change they should have accepted, and th
Byebye Node.js. (Score:5, Interesting)
If these guys know how to play it right, Node.js is history. He had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.
I hope this new project knows how to manage things and do good marketing.
Thumbs up. Let's see where this goes.
Re:Byebye Node.js. (Score:5, Funny)
If these PEOPLE know how to play it right, Node.js is history. HE/SHE had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone (POSSIBLY HAVING A PENIS BUT POSSIBLY NOT) remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.
FTFY
So what's this about? (Score:2)
What are the specific grievances?
I mean, they wouldn't want the fork if the corporation handled the management right. Even if through just one person, but one *competent* person.
Joyent (Score:2)
Joyent has made news before also.
http://news.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
They shut down paid lifetime accounts earlier.
The main question is (Score:2)
Why didn't they fork it before? (Score:2)
Streams are broken, callbacks are not great to work with, errors are vague, tooling is not great, community convention is sort of there, but lacking compared to Go. That being said there are certain tasks which I would probably still use Node for, building web sites, maybe the odd API or prototype. If Node can fix some of its fundamental problems then it has good chance at remaining relevant, but the performance over usability argument doesn’t fly when another solution is both more performant and more user-friendly.
And now they're forking Node over this ?
So I'm guessing streams will still be broken and callback will still be not great to work with.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
When someone thinks the standard isn't working.... [xkcd.com]
How many years after the OpenOffice fork are there people still thinking what's OpenOffice vs LibreOffice? How many years past Oracle giving the keys to the source repository to OpenOffice do we still think OpenOffice vs LibreOffice
When it comes between slogging through a new architecture, or dealing with people, usually the new architecure is easier and almost always more fun. One advantage to paid projects (note: before mod down, this is a single advantag
What a great reason to fork a project.... (Score:2)
NOT.
Can't we all just get along?
Now, let's focus on more serious issues. I've dealt with my share of this. I was almost fired from Sony San Diego Studio for my clicky keyboard. Let's make sure all projects permit the use of clicky keyboards, or FORK IT!
You know what, though - I decided it wasn't worth it - I just put up with a crappy Microsoft keyboard.
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So they are required to continue donating their time and energy from the start to entirety just because they accepted sponsorship for a period of time?
Re:take their money and run... real classy (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations need to understand that while they will get features they want, sometimes they need to address the needs of the whole community. Else, they will end up with no support. No support, but everything you want may be okay, but more likely no support will kill whatever it is that you wanted.
Re:take their money and run... real classy (Score:4, Informative)
if these open source projects are going to accept corporate sponsorship, they must do that corporation's bidding.
The people and entities who signed the sponsorship contract must do what they contractually agreed to do (which may be virtually nothing or it may be very specific depends what was in the contract).
Other people aren't bound by that though. Most contributors to open source projects do not have any contract with or obligation to the operators of the project. If they (or their employers if relavent) decide they would rather put their effort into a fork then they are perfectly entitled to do so.
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if these open source projects are going to accept corporate sponsorship, they must do that corporation's bidding.
No. If an open source project's leadership accepts monetary or other sponsorship, then the leadership of that project has to do the corporation's bidding. The other contributors can still do whatever the fuck they want.
To be honest, unless there's a contract (with a term) involved, the project's leadership can change or reject the terms at any time, and can definitely negotiate or even reject any changes (proposed or actual in their relationship with the sponsor.
Finally, this is a two-way street - the spons
Incorrect... (Score:2)
A 'project' is a vague concept. What 'sponsorship' means can be vague too. Are they providing hosting services? Are they managing the authentication configuration? Did they impose some CI where they get final say? Did they provide employment to some or all participants? Did they pay as part of a contract arrangement for the time of some developers?
In short, knowing how corporate sponsorship historically happens in open source, the corporation maybe provides some contribution, but does take control of
Re:Effort dilution (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true. For "the common man" to know what direction to take, too many choices can be bad......especially when there is more similarity than differences and not enough experience to know which differences will be important to them in the future.
Re:Effort dilution (Score:5, Interesting)
The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice..
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
It also provides a very useful ejection seat of sorts in case of corporate asshattery (see also OpenOffice/Libre Office), patent follies, or worse. Also, consider this: Closed-Source/proprietary software can be just as prone to this kind of internal dissent as OSS, but you the end-user will never have a say in the results.
Forking is awesome to have as an option - either as a threat or as an actuality. A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves, or they will lose control of their product. IMHO that's a damned good thing.
Re:Effort dilution (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal".
MacDonalds didn't get where they were because their products were the best. Their milkshakes taste like library paste. They got there because once they'd achieved critical mass in the market - as the old saying goes: Nothing Succeeds Like Success. Once customers knew that they could obtain a consistent product from coast-to-coast, even though it was consistently second-rate, growth was assured.
Or perhaps an example closer to home. The Commodore Amiga. The first mass-market computer to include Total Harmonic Distortion and Stereo Separation specs on the outside of the package. The first mass-market computer to come out-of-the-box with color graphics (accelerated), Hi-fi stereo sound and full pre-emptive real-time multi-tasking. Even most modern-day systems aren't real-time.
This was the company that "succeeded in spite of itself". Demonstrating that incompetent government isn't the only way to kill competitiveness, Commodore fielded a superior product which could have been even more successful if they hadn't been cursed with incompetent management.
But bad management or not, I'm really doubtful that they'd own the market today. The Wintel platform was already too well entrenched and "Nobody Ever Got Fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Intel". Even Apple is just an also-ran. The competiton was inferior, but it was sufficient and these days only a few tattered remnants are all that remains of the Amiga.
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MacDonalds' products are the best. Atleast if you define "best" as "fastest and cheapest".
Personally I define "best" as "tastiest for a reasonable price", in which case MacDonalds' products are not the best.
It's all subjective.
VHS had the longest video tapes and apparently that was all people cared about, so for a lot of people it was the best.
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Node.js is a shitty hamburger restaurant?
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Node.js is a shitty hamburger restaurant?
Yes - but their fries are pretty tasty.
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The Commodore Amiga. The first mass-market computer to include Total Harmonic Distortion and Stereo Separation specs on the outside of the package. The first mass-market computer to come out-of-the-box with color graphics (accelerated), Hi-fi stereo sound and full pre-emptive real-time multi-tasking. Even most modern-day systems aren't real-time.
i believe that your are somewhat mistaken with this quote.
if memory serves me right, that Atari ST was the first to market with most of these features. i remember this because i bought one...it was buggy as hell but i did sorta work. way ahead of its time.
Re:Effort dilution (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget that the PC totally owned the business market, spreadsheets were the killer application of the 80s and the Amiga's multimedia capabilities was totally irrelevant to that. In fact, graphics and sound cards were an add-on to PCs long, long after that. They could have made something similar to the Sony Playstation and become kings of the gaming market, but I doubt they ever had a shot at replacing the PC.
At any rate, it's obvious that in many cases we have picked a non-optimal solution, but the switching costs are just too high. Things like driving on left vs right, power plugs, 50Hz vs 60Hz TV, imperial vs metric and so on. Or simply because of history or network effects, we use COBOL because we got 20 years of code written in COBOL. Or we're on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. Products are like genes, it's not the "best" genes that survive it's those that turn a profit and reproduce.
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The power plugs? I hate them both, but have no better solution. Euro 220V plugs are entirely too big thoug
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Funny, the biggest issue I get with switching RHD to LHD is checking my blind spot over the opposite shoulder. The motion feels unnatural.
PAL actually has reasons besides intentional incompatibility. Alternating phase on alternate lines makes it possible to correct for phase shift, so the tint control can be set and forgotten.
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I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal".
Well, you need to define 'best' under these circumstances. The Linux kernel became 'best' when it was found that it supported and sustained the involvement of the widest developer/manufacturer constituency at a reasonable level of quality. That's hardly a glowing endorsement of the quality of the code or the operation of the kernel in real-world scenarios.
Remember that the abiding challenge for technologists is not so much 'best' as 'good enough'.
So yes, GP is wrong to see the free market as one in which th
Re:Effort dilution (vs. Stigmergy) (Score:2)
"The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice.."
All too true too often. And the failure of the Linux Desktop to gain traction is a prime example of that (other than finally essentially via the Chromebook).
That said, "Stigmergy" is a way that large structures (like the FOSS landscape?) can get built by entities following relatively simple local rules. For example, termites build big complex mounds by getting excited when they see other termites having accomplished something small but interesting (creating
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And the failure of the Linux Desktop to gain traction is a prime example of that (other than finally essentially via the Chromebook).
well, there is always next year.
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Spoken like a true newcomer to open source. I've been reading slashdot since it was called "chips and dips" (that was around 1997) and to this day it still amazes me that somebody who rejects the principles of open source would have the slightest interest reading slashdot, let alone participating in a slashdot discussion. You're as out-of-place here as an atheist at mass.
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The point is that the abiliity to fork is a core principle and key prerequisite of open source. Furthermore, choice is the basic premise and driving force of open source. To complain about choice in open source is nonsensical, because if choice wasn't there, it wouldn't be open source in the first place. It's like a proprietary software developer complaining that he DOESN'T have choice. Well, duh!
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The freedom to fork is like the freedom of speech. You have it, and you can use it, but there may be consequences when you do so there may be times when it's advisable to not do so.
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Nonsense. They cut out a negative contributor and hence increased effective effort.
Re:difference? (Score:5, Informative)
People don't fork 'just because they can'. They fork because they are failing to get what they want out of the project. It remains to be seen if they are wasting their time.
It could be like ethereal to wireshark, where the holder of the copyright has precisely *zero* development skin in the game.
It could be like XFree86 to Xorg where both had some nominal capability to continue, but it becomes quickly apparent that the fork is where the development effort went.
It could be like Wayland fork where the fork pretty much died (though the main project isn't seeing massive adoption either).
Worst case would be something like the ffmpeg/libav fiasco, where both forks go and which one is available readily for a given distribution is almost more a matter of politics than technical merit, and yet they have significantly diverged.
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Unless they plan to change the feature set, offer something node doesn't, they're wasting their time.
If the top contributors migrate, then what they'll have to offer that node doesn't is being where the action is.